Читать книгу Beyond the Barrier Reef - Christopher Cummings - Страница 8

Chapter 1

RESEARCH PROJECT

April school holidays

The Great Barrier Reef

Between Cairns and Townsville, North Queensland

1030hrs. A bright, sunny day

Andrew Collins, sixteen, sat in the inflatable rubber boat and fidgeted with adjusting the straps of his Buoyancy Control Device or BCD. This is the inflatable vest that SCUBA divers wear to adjust their depth control and to which their compressed air tanks are secured. There were three other divers and a crewman in the boat and Andrew was hoping that they had not noticed how scared he was.

Particularly Carmen, Andrew thought glancing at his seventeen-year-old sister beside him.

It was her doing that had placed him in this predicament, but he was not going to let on that he was hating almost every minute of it. Carmen had been asked by her friend Ella if they would help her big brother Tristan with his university thesis in marine biology by taking part in a survey of marine organisms. Carmen, who obviously loved diving, had thought it was a wonderful idea and had agreed, then asked Andrew to make up the numbers.

So here I am, and I wish I was anywhere but here, Andrew thought as he looked around.

Not that he minded being in the boat. Andrew loved sailing and was a very accomplished and experienced small boat handler. It was below the water that his courage evaporated. Partly this was the way he had always felt but it was the traumatic experiences of being trapped underwater in the wreck of the Merinda with the skeleton of his grandfather that had really consolidated his fear.

That had been eighteen months ago and the only diving that Andrew had done since had been almost as traumatic. That had been three dives during their expedition to look for the wreck of a Dutch World War 2 Dornier flying boat the previous January. During that Andrew had been with Carmen when they had found a dead body in a wrecked launch after a cyclone.

And Andrew knew he only had himself to blame. When Carmen asked if I would go I should have said no or told her the truth, he mused. In fact, he suspected she knew the truth and had hinted that a dive trip might help him regain his nerve. Like people who fall off a horse getting straight back on one, he decided.

But it had still taken a real effort to hide his fear and to act normally. The first dive had been a real ordeal but since then familiarity had helped to ease the terror back to a nagging anxiety.

I hope there are no problems this trip, Andrew thought.

So far there hadn’t been. It was the third day of the expedition and on the previous two days they had been diving four times each day. The first day had been spent travelling from Townsville out to the outer reef in the university research boat. This was a fifteen-metre dive boat that was at that moment anchored in the lee of the reef they were surveying. Andrew could just see its mast over the top of the tiny sand cay that showed among the breakers which fringed the reef.

The reef they were surveying was called Yule Reef and that pleased Andrew as he admired the work of Lieutenant Yule, Royal Navy, who as the captain of the British gunboat HMS Bramble, had done much of the detailed surveying of the Great Barrier Reef during the mid-nineteenth century. Yule Reef was only about half a kilometre long and perhaps two hundred wide and was completely submerged on the high tides.

At that moment Andrew and his friends were at the northern end. Separating Yule Reef from the next reef to the north, Challenger Reef, was a deep-water passage named the Challenger Channel. Andrew was glad it was behind them as it was half a kilometre wide and was so deep that the bottom was not visible. Instead the seabed just faded down through shades of blue to an inky blackness and was the sort of place that conjured up all of Andrew’s worst fears about monsters of the deep. To make it worse a strong current was now scouring through it, running west with increasing force as the tide rose.

Andrew moved to look around. Off to his left rear, away to the northeast, he could just make out the tiny black square that was the old stone building on Prescott Island. That was their base camp and was five kilometres away with the main stretch of the Challenger Channel in between.

Directly to his left, to the east, was another set of distant reefs, the Longbow Reefs, so named because of their shape on the chart. They were also about five kilometres away and were marked by two dark lumps that Andrew knew were shipwrecks, one 19^th century and the other a very recent 21^st century wreck. Half a kilometre to the south of Yule Reef were a series of long parallel reefs called the Feathers Reefs. Between Yule Reef and the Feathers Reefs was a large area of shallow seabed and another deep-water channel, the Bramble Boat Passage. That was where they were swimming to on the next dive.

Carmen turned to Andrew and began checking his straps and the connections of his air tank. Then she took his alternate air source and tested it. Andrew managed to return her grin and then do the same safety checks with her equipment. Beside him the other two divers, nineteen-year-old Tristan Lyall and his seventeen-year-old sister Ella, were busy carrying out the same drills. Ella ruffled her curly fair hair and then zipped up her BCD and began doing up the buckles. In the process she squeezed her breasts together. Unlike the other three divers she wore only a brief bikini, preferring it to the neoprene wetsuits worn by the others.

Andrew tried not to look at those bulging bosoms but found it hard not to. He was at the age where he had become very interested in girls. But he did not want his sister to notice this, so he hastily looked away and pretended to check that his weight belt was securely buckled. It was a relief when Ella had the BCD done up as it covered her whole upper body. Now he could only see her very shapely hips and bare legs!

Another Uni student, Dan Powell, sat at the stern and was the safety boat crewman. The blue and white diver’s flag fluttered on a short whip that doubled as a radio antenna. Dan had a small radio and now informed Mr Craig, the master of the launch, that the divers were ready.

Andrew spat in his facemask and leant over the side to swill seawater around in it. Then he pulled the facemask over his head so that it hung under his chin. As he did he heard a distinctive sound.

Aircraft, he thought, looking around.

The others heard it too and all stared at the sky. It was Duncan who saw the machine first. “There,” he said, pointing south.

Andrew saw it then, a twin-engine machine that grew rapidly larger as it approached. The aircraft flew past about half a kilometre to the east and at only about a thousand feet altitude. It was painted a distinctive red and white pattern and Andrew knew what it was even before it was close enough to read the words painted on its fuselage.

“Coastwatch,” he said.

Four times in the last four years the Coastwatch planes run by Customs had played an important part in his life so he was quite happy to see one flying by. They flew daily patrols to try to detect ships and boats involved in smuggling, illegal immigration and illegal fishing in Australia’s Economic Zone.

Like that Taiwanese trawler over there on Longbow Reef, he remembered.

That had been fishing illegally in Australian waters but had suffered an engine failure during a storm the previous year and had been blown onto the reef.

As the aircraft flew past low overhead all five divers waved. Andrew knew that it would have been in radio contact with the dive launch and that the aircraft crew would know who they were. That was important as they were in a restricted zone where special permits were needed. As a university research activity they had these. The aircraft flew on and was soon lost to sight.

Tristan now looked at each in turn, a quizzical expression on his freckled, cheerful face. “All OK? Good, then let’s get this done before the tide gets too strong.”

With that he placed his regulator in his mouth, adjusted his facemask and rolled backwards into the sea. As Andrew watched Tristan’s fins vanish into the water he felt his stomach churn.

Bloody hell! Here we go! he thought.

He would have dearly loved to stay in the boat, but he dutifully positioned his facemask, gave Carmen what he hoped looked like a cheerful grin and not a sickly smile, and then placed his regulator in his mouth. Carmen did likewise and then turned her head to check that she was not going to hit Ella with her fins as she went over backwards. Then she rolled away. Ella gave Andrew a grin and then put in her regulator and followed.

Andrew took a last quick look around at the clear blue sky and the sunlight sparkling on the blue sea then he also rolled over backwards. It was something he hated doing and was a procedure he had never understood.

Why don’t divers just lower themselves into the water? he wondered for the hundredth time.

But it was better than jumping with legs spread from the deck of a launch, so he just clenched his teeth and did it rather than excite comment.

The water closed over him, cold only on his head and hands to begin with. He heard the familiar rasping, sucking noises as he began breathing through the regulator and he allowed himself to sink and settle to a feet down position. The first thing Andrew did was look around to check on the position of the other divers and in particular his dive buddy, who for this dive was Ella. She was only a few metres away and was looking at him while she adjusted her buoyancy.

Andrew used the valve connecting his air tank to his BCD to adjust his own buoyancy so that he hung effortlessly and apparently weightless a few metres below the surface. Above him he could clearly see the outline of the rubber boat as it bobbed on what looked like a rippling silver ceiling. Then he took a quick look in all directions, this action motivated more by fear than anything else. It did not really reassure him when he saw nothing unusual.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, he thought, ‘they’ being the sharks and other creatures of the deep that he feared.

What he saw was the wall of the reef only ten metres to his right. Ahead of him stretched the reef and a gently sloping sandy bottom. To his left the sandy bottom extended outwards, slowly getting deeper until it was lost in the blue. That was alright. He was on the right in the pair of divers so was the nearest to the reef. That meant considerably less danger of some giant shark suddenly rushing out of the darkness with jaws agape. But perversely it also meant it was the direction from which smaller but also worrying creatures like moray eels might suddenly lunge forth to snap and bite.

Now the dark abyss of the Challenger Channel was directly behind him and Andrew could not resist the urge to frequently glance back at that dark blue-black void of liquid fear. With an effort of willpower, he looked back towards Ella. She gave him a thumbs-up and he returned it, hoping his anxiety was not obvious.

Sharks rarely attack divers, he reminded himself. Or only sharks like White Pointers and they are creatures of the cold Southern Ocean and are rare in tropical waters. But the intellectual theory was small comfort to his worries.

Ella began swimming southwards with the reef ten metres to her right. Andrew set off parallel a few metres further in. He saw that Carmen and Tristan were already ten metres ahead and fifty metres out to his left front. They were going deeper and were doing a survey of the seagrass on the seabed. There wasn’t much visible and Andrew did not think they would see much.

Not on the seaward side of the reef where the big waves work, he thought.

Checking the distribution and health of the seagrass was part of Tristan’s thesis study and so far they had found little, only a few isolated pockets in the shallower, more sheltered water on the western side of the reefs. Andrew and Ella had the task of surveying the number and size of the brain corals on the edge of the reef. They also had the secondary task of helping Dan calculate the amount of seaweed that was growing on the actual reef. That was the topic he was researching as there was some evidence that the seaweed was encroaching on the coral. To do this Ella had an underwater camera and both had small plastic slates and crayon pens. At present the water was too shallow to swim safely across the top of the reef without risking injury to themselves or damage to the coral. They would do that from the boat during the high tide period.

Drawn on his plastic slate Andrew had an outline map of the reef overlain on a grid which showed every ten metres to scale. Using the pen, he began to mark on brain corals and seaweed as he saw them, using dots for brain coral and small squiggly strokes for the seaweed. The work at least took his mind partly off his fears. He swam just below and to the right of Ella so she could take photos every few metres. The distance swum they had to estimate.

All the usual small fish flitted among the coral, but Andrew had seen too many sunfish, clown fish and other colourful types to be really interested. Instead he kept glancing around to check that nothing large was eyeing him off as a potential meal. The day before a large shark had cruised by and just that one fleeting glimpse had reignited all of Andrew’s fears.

The only really good thing was that the visibility was excellent. Usually it was about fifty metres, but he estimated he could see clearly almost twice that.

Probably because we are so far from the mainland and there has been no strong wind for a week so the waves haven’t stirred up the silt, he thought.

The sandy seabed was only about twenty metres below, with Andrew swimming at ten metres and Ella just above that. Carmen and Tristan appeared to be swimming along about five metres above the sand.

This isn’t too bad, Andrew decided.

In an attempt to overcome his anxieties, he refocused on his job and made a point of trying to note all the different types of fish that he saw. Knowing that tourists paid big money to do exactly what he was now doing added a distinctive twist to his sense of the absurd.

After about two hundred metres Andrew noted that the wall of the reef was trending in to a sort of a bay. He had been expecting that because the air photos of the reef showed just such a shape. The increased current flowing into the ‘bay’ was also expected because they had found an obvious gap, like a miniature canyon, extending deep into the reef when they had surveyed the other side earlier in the morning. The old survey charts did not show any channel or gap but the air photos did and Andrew agreed with the suggestion that there was probably a narrow pass right through the reef.

So he swam into the narrowing gap behind Ella, noting that the current was increasing every second. The tide was now on the rise and was squeezing through all the gaps in the reef as the ocean level rose out to the east. We need to be careful here, he told himself. So he swam up beside Ella and got her attention. Using gestures, he shook his head and swept his hands across to indicate ‘no’.

She looked at him quizzically, so he turned his slate over and printed the word ‘current’ and held it up for her to read. She looked, then nodded and gave a thumbs-up. By then they were right in the mouth of an obvious passage. It was about ten metres wide and the same deep with vertical sides and a sandy bottom.

Both now turned and began swimming back against the current. This turned out to be much harder than Andrew had expected and he quickly revised the current speed from three knots to five or six.

Anyway, enough to make this hard work, he thought as he finned hard against the flow. The effort soon had him sucking in big lung-fulls of air and he knew that wasn’t good.

Need to take it easy, he reminded himself.

As they swam back out into the wider ‘bay’ area the current eased and they were able to make more progress. Ella stopped to take another couple of photos and Andrew made more notes on his slate. Then they resumed swimming south along the outer edge of the reef. As they did Andrew looked around for Carman and saw her and Tristan in the distance. They were now on the limit of visibility and showed only as flickering shadows.

We had better catch up, Andrew thought.

He began powering after them and then flinched with fright when Ella touched his arm. He looked at her anxiously, but she just smiled and pointed to her pressure gauge. That made Andrew feel guilty as they had been down for fifteen minutes and he knew he should have remembered to check hers every ten. So he slowed while she looked at his gauge and then gave him the pressure reading by hand signals. 175psi she informed him. That was plenty for the twenty or thirty minutes they might still be down at such a shallow depth. Andrew checked hers and saw that it was 180psi and the thought that she was a more skilled diver irked him a little.

Both then resumed their survey, swimming slowly along the side of the reef. By then they were well away from the Challenger Channel and the inky blackness no longer threatened. Instead the visibility just shaded off through pale green to a dark greeny-yellow and then to a sort of shadowy darkness. The only larger creatures Andrew saw during the next five minutes were a couple of stingrays which kicked up sand as they moved or tried to hide. There was not even a large parrot fish or groper visible.

Then a flicker of movement up to his right front sent a shiver of fear though Andrew. He looked anxiously up and then breathed a sigh of relief. It was a large turtle. The creature had swum into view over the top of the reef and now dived across their front and swam rapidly off into the gloom. Andrew watched it with admiration. Turtles were reptiles that he really liked.

Green turtle or a Loggerhead? he wondered, staring hard to try to pick out the salient features as it swam almost directly away from him. Green, he decided.

Two minutes later, another flicker of movement out to his left resolved itself not into a friendly turtle but into what he had feared—a large shark! It had come from behind and was swimming slowly along in the same direction and he was sure it had seen them.

Andrew felt his heart skip a beat and he began to breathe rapidly. Reaching out he tapped Ella and pointed to draw her attention to the thing. It looked to be a bronze whaler and Andrew estimated it to be four metres long.

Big enough to chew me up anyway, he decided.

Ella looked and then nodded and even took a photo. Andrew watched with his stomach churning and his whole body cringing as the shark swam up level with them about twenty-five metres away. He tensed, ready to try to fend it off and then he fingered the handle of his sheath knife with his right hand. Then he realized that he was seeing dots and that his vision was going blurry.

I am hyperventilating, he told himself. With a conscious effort of willpower, he slowed his breathing.

For a moment the shark turned towards them and Andrew glimpsed the rows of vicious looking teeth and his blood ran cold.

It is going to attack! he thought. He gripped the knife, ready to draw it.

But it didn’t. Instead the shark turned away and swam off to the left front out into deeper water. As it went Andrew sighed with relief and, despite his fear, was able to admire the sleek lines and absolute efficiency of its swimming style. Then it vanished into the gloom, leaving only Andrew’s rapidly beating heart and the memory of those teeth and the unwinking eye. The memory of the creature stayed with Andrew, causing him to continually look around

Ten minutes later they reached the southern end of the reef. The location was obvious both by the trend of the reef, indicated by the compass on his dive computer, and by the increasing strength of the current pushing them. Also the shape and colour of the seabed began to change. As they rounded the curve to the southern end of the reef the bottom sloped gradually down on their left to a sandy valley which shaded into dark blue depths.

The Bramble Boat Passage, Andrew thought.

From studying the chart he was able to visualize the channel. He knew that the Boat Passage branched off from the main Challenger Channel near Prescott Island. It then ran Southwest gradually getting shallower. At its junction with the Challenger Channel the Boat Passage was one hundred and twenty-five fathoms deep, over two hundred and thirty metres, deep enough for the largest of ships, but by the time it reached the half-kilometre wide gap between Yule Reef and the Five Feathers Reefs to the south it was only five fathoms, nine metres. This was why it had never been suitable for ships to use, unlike the Challenger Channel which was still forty fathoms, over seventy-five metres deep at its shallowest.

The bottom is all sand and this end has a bathtub shape, Andrew remembered.

A careful look around seemed to confirm this as he could see the sandy slope rising from the deeper channel and then reaching an obvious crest off to his front. Beyond that the water became deeper again as it shelved away on the western side of the line of reefs.

Andrew noticed movement out to his left, well away from the reef. What is that? he wondered anxiously. Then he saw that it was Carmen and Tristan. They were right down near the bottom and were swimming directly away from the reef. Where on earth are they going? Andrew wondered. He could not remember any part of the plan about going south across the Boat Passage.

Quickly he checked his compass. Yes, they are going across the Boat Passage. That both puzzled and worried him. If they aren’t careful they could get caught by the current as the tide gets higher, he thought. That could sweep them off to the west and give them a hard swim to get around behind Yule Reef to where the dive boat was anchored.

Andrew looked around and saw that Ella was also looking. She gave a shrug but Andrew shook his head, then moved to check her air pressure. ‘95,’ he signalled. He looked at his own and it informed him that he only had 75psi left. That worried Andrew a bit as he knew he should keep about fifty in case of emergencies and they still had a few hundred metres to swim to get back to the dive boat.

But I have only been swimming at about five metres, he thought, so I shouldn’t have too much nitrogen to dissipate.

As he worked this out Andrew watched Carmen and Tristan. They were now on the limit of visibility and that got Andrew even more anxious. Now undecided about what to do he looked up and noted that the inflatable was moving out across the Boat Passage as well, obviously following the trail of bubbles.

Where are they going? he wondered. Then he noted a dark bump on the seabed out on the crest line. And what is that?

Whatever it was Carmen and Tristan were obviously going to investigate it. Probably just a rock or small outcrop of coral, Andrew surmised. But even as he did this his eye noted a straight line half-hidden in the sand of the seabed. It came from down to his left and ran across the seabed towards the dark hump.

What the devil is that? Andrew wondered, pointing to it to bring it to Ella’s attention.

It was clearly not natural, and Andrew guessed that it had attracted the attention of Carmen and Tristan. He had been about to swim on around the end of the reef and back to the dive boat but now he signalled to Ella that he was going to join the others. She shook her head, but Andrew was determined. Where Carmen was going he was going.

Quickly he printed on the back of his slate: We can always surface and go back in the boat.

Ella read this and gave a thumbs-up. Andrew at once began swimming, angling slowly down towards the straight line on the sand. To reach that he had to go down to fifteen metres but that did not bother him at all as he was qualified to go to thirty. As he went down Andrew noted that the current was moving him sideways to his right so he had to ‘crab’ to the left across it to reach the line.

As he got closer Andrew saw that it was not one line but a pair of steel wire ropes. Curious he swam right down and touched one to check. Two steel wire ropes lying side by side, both new and in good condition, he noted, grimacing with annoyance as the rope was coated in some sort of grease.

Looking to his left he saw that the ropes ran down into deeper water and then ended abruptly at what looked like a pulley block.

Curious to see if he was right Andrew swam that way, going another five metres deeper as he did. It was a pulley block. The block was shackled to a steel ring set in what looked like a large block of concrete. The concrete block was almost completely buried in the seabed.

What on earth is all this? he wondered.

Andrew looked around at Ella, who was close beside him. She met his eyes and shrugged. Andrew also shrugged, then checked both his depth and his remaining air. Still got 65psi, he thought.

Ella informed him she had 70psi. Andrew knew he was now moving into a potentially dangerous phase if he stayed down much longer but he reasoned that he would be going back slowly upwards if he followed the ropes.

They are going to that lump on the crest and it is only at five or six metres, he reasoned.

So he turned and swam back along the steel wire ropes, heading for where Carmen and Tristan could just be made out as tiny moving shapes at the dark mound.

What is it that they are looking at? Andrew wondered.